After half a millennium the passions of Martin Luther’s revolution are spent. Yet Christianity remains a bedrock of Europe’s quest for valuesAlmost precisely 499 years ago,when he fastened his 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Martin Luther set in motion the cascade of argument, and then formal schism,war and revolution that we know as the Reformation. Latin Christianity had been the language in which Europe talked to itself for the preceding 1000 years. Now it was to become the language in which Europe fought with itself. The consequence was the contemporary world. The savage devout wars of the 16th and 17th centuries gave birth to the nation state. The vernacular bibles of the Reformation shaped and fixed the languages in which they were printed. The struggles of European nations became global and their empires spread Christianity around the world.
And now, the European centuries are over. An Argentinian Jesuit pope is visiting a female archbishop who heads the Lutheran Church of Sweden, and one of the most secularised countries in the most secularised continent in the world. This would have been almost unimaginable half a century ago. The Reformation is finally over in Europe,not because either side has won, but because both sides have been overcome with exhaustion and brushed to the margins of history by their apparent irrelevance.
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Source: theguardian.com